How downtime impacts the bottom line 2014

Lots of good statistics about the causes, costs and next steps that companies can utilize for understanding their risk and potential costs related to downtime, so they can procure additional funds to protect against future availability issues.

Let’s take a quick look at the high level findings published in the Infographic.

91% still experience downtime

33% of all downtime is caused by IT equipment failure

IT equipment failure is the most expensive outage (23%). Twice as high as every other except cyber crime (21%).

Average length of downtime is still over 86 minutes

Average cost of downtime has increased 54% to $8,023 per minute.

Based on these statistics, 30% (33% of 91%) of all data centers will have downtime related to IT equipment failure. Assuming they only have one incident of the average length, they would incur $689,978 (86 x $8,023) in downtime related costs.

Stratus can address 33% of the most costly downtime with our fault-tolerant hardware and software solutions.

52% believe the outages could have been prevented. This makes sense, because 48% is caused by accident and human error. Only training, personnel changes or outsourcing can improve that cause of downtime.

70% believe cloud is equal or better than their existing availability. That’s if you don’t look too close at the SLA details (i.e. excluding “emergency maintenance” or downtime only counts toward SLA if over xx min per incident). Certainly most cloud providers can provide better than the 99.98% [(525,600-86)/525,600] availability these data centers are currently averaging (assuming only one incident of average length). But remember, all SLAs are limited to the cost of the service, which I assume is far less than the almost $700k downtime related cost most in the survey have realized.

Cloud solutions are constantly improving; but we continue to hear from our customers that availability still has a long way to go, especially when it comes to stateful legacy workloads that don’t have availability built into the application like native cloud apps. Of course, this is something that we at Stratus are working on.

I say look into availability options and invest upfront in the best availability you can afford, it might not pay dividends upfront, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Because $50k spent on availability might be worth $700k in related costs, not to mention headaches and tarnished reputation.